It feels like the first time

It feels like the first time It feels like the very first time I have waited a lifetime Spent my time so foolishly But now that I've found you Together we'll make history

Foto.Feola.Friday

What was the first photo you created? Everyone takes snapshots and selfies — here we are together smiling and happy at PHOTO_ATTRACTION! But at some point you wanted more. At some point you wanted better. At some point you wanted to create a photograph, not a snapshot.

Here's mine: I’d decided in 8th grade that I wanted to be a writer, and refined that to playwright by the time I was in college. I dropped out junior year when I got a job writing for a newspaper; Why pay to learn to be writer, when I could be a writer and get paid? Isn’t that how Twain and Hemingway and a bunch of others got started? On my first day my editor handed me a camera and said “Reporters take photos for their stories.” And just like that I was a photojournalist. I looked through the viewfinder, and was swept away; framing subjects was exactly like staging a play in the theater's proscenium arch. So I started taking photos! But I was...not bad. I was TERRIBLE. All of my photos were Important People Grinning and Gripping the Large Check/Trophy/Prize. Nobody at the paper was really any better, so I started raiding the library, and was fortunate enough to come across Ansel Adams’ books, which I devoured. Here's the first photo I made. I'm not arguing it's a great photo. It isn't. But it also isn't a Grip and Grin snapshot. I exposed for the shadows, then dodged and burned like mad. It's the first image I took and printed and then could say "Now how do I make this better?" Rather than "Maybe I should take up knitting." I apologize for the quality of this digital copy; I'm reorganizing decades’ worth of negatives right now, and cannot lay my hands on either the neg or the print in a timely manner. This is a decade-old snap with a phone camera of the print, but you get the idea.

What was the first photo you made? Please leave a comment here; we’d really like to know!

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Sunday November 5-The Reader: Caught between Scylla and Charybdis: Doom Loops-how things going bad makes things go even worse. Once you’ve fallen too far, All Options Suck. When a city gets in trouble and starts losing population, people with money and options are the first to leave, because they can. If too many leave, the tax base suffers. That leads to more problems. And more people with options headed to greener pastures…